For decades, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) of Armonk, N.Y. has been at the forefront of new paradigms in business computing. Currently IBM is developing a new computing utility service initiative, or “e-business on demand” (EBOD). Briefly, EBOD is a form of information technology (IT) based upon “power by the hour” in which a client pays only for the level of computing services actually used. Customers of IBOD transfer their IT environment to a utility management infrastructure (UMI) and pay only for the actual computing services received. Like electricity, water and gas, IT is treated as another utility. Thus, by eliminating the responsibility of building and maintaining IT operations, providing necessary education and training to administrators, and having to comply with applicable regulations, the customer can focus on their core business while enjoying variable pricing, automated processes and the invaluable resilience and responsiveness of a shared infrastructure provided by IBM.
Customers transitioning from a dedicated IT environment to an EBOD environment may be concerned about the efficiency of the new paradigm and their loss of control of actual IT operations. Although current vendors of shared IT infrastructure may allow customers to analyze the responsiveness or their IT system, there are no real-time service testing tools that support the new emerging utility-like middleware such as The IBM EBOD infrastructure.
Existing products include typical system testing suites, WinRunner published by Mercury Interactive, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. and the forthcoming Blue Typhoon graphical user interface (GUI) by IBM. Typical system testing suites simply employ computer commands such as “top,” “sar,” “wait,” “vmastat,” “netstat” and “ping” to determine utilization of resources such as CPU, memory, disks and network but do not provide a way to test hypothetical loads.
WinRunner captures actual IT events and then, based upon the captured events, emulates users performing the work of maneuvering through a series of GUIs, either client or web-based. The number of users can be adjusted but WinRunner only test hits on application specific functionalities requiring some type of user interface. In other words, WinRunner tests user interfaces rather than simulating the stress on a particular application and the use of specific shared capabilities like processing, network functionality and data storage.
Blue Typhoon GUI is a Java swing/applet application that enables customers to modify computing capacity and allocate and/or de-allocate computing resources. Although this approach provides customers with a passive view of resources, Blue Typhoon does not provide a way to retrieve share system/application data in an active manner with real-life, real-time testing.